RealKey launched its automated lending platform on Wednesday, entering a crowded market of fintechs that digitize and automate mortgage lending.

The San Francisco-based company competes against Blend, Roostify, Floify, Better and other mortgage digitalization solutions, Leslie Parrish, a retail banking analyst with the Aite Group, told Bank Automation News. Better announced plans to go public this week.

“There has been a lot of fintechs that have been either moving into this space or grabbing market share in the last five years,” Parrish said. These tools provide a better customer experience by providing a digital platform layer to loan origination solutions (LOS) while making the process more efficient, Parrish added.

Parrish categorized RealKey as possibly offering a “lighter solution” than competitors, but one more focused on collaboration during the loan process.

Founder and CEO Christopher Hussain said he has done loan originations in every state and wanted to solve the problems he has experienced processing loans.

“When we first started on the back of a napkin, it was to bring all the parties involved into a single platform, so that everything was centralized and standardized so, ideally, consumers could take their documents and go anywhere,” Hussain said. “We want to do this for student loans, auto loans, other parts of the financial ecosystem.”

The platform takes a document-first approach to lending, Hussain said, an idea that originated with Alan Tifford, RealKey’s head of experience design strategy and the former design lead for the TurboTax product line.

RealKey generates a list of all needs and conditions in the loan process, then uses proprietary algorithms to analyze application, credit and fee data, and identifies which documents are required for the loan, Hussain said. The platform provides one central location for customers, loan officers, and others to submit, manage and monitor the status of documents and chat with one another, a functionality that Hussain compared to communication platform Slack.

The fintech’s solution integrates with Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, as well as with applications such as Intuit, Mint, H&R Block, CoreLogic Credco, and also runs an automated underwriting engine.

Greg Schlackman, a loan officer with the Draper, Utah-based, independent mortgage lender Academy Mortgage, tried out the platform.

“It catches small stuff for underwriting purposes,” Schlackman told BAN. “It’ll catch a re-occurring payment on the bank statement, then send out a request for that as a condition, so the underwriter doesn’t have to spend much time on the loan.”

RealKey was formed in 2015, and has raised $2.8 million in seed money to date, according to a company spokesperson.